1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to methods and apparatus for management of data networks.
2. Description of the Related Art
Packetized data networks are in widespread use transporting mission critical data throughout the world. A typical data transmission system includes a plurality of customer (user) sites and a data packet switching network, which resides between the sites to facilitate communication among the sites via paths through the network.
Packetized data networks typically format data into packets for transmission from one site to another. In particular, the data is partitioned into separate packets at a transmission site, wherein the packets usually include headers containing information relating to packet data and routing. The packets are transmitted to a destination site in accordance with any of several conventional data transmission protocols known in the art, one example of which is the Internet Protocol (IP).
Networks that communicate using the IP are an effective and flexible mechanism for enabling a wide variety of applications. However different applications frequently exhibit very different performance and capacity capabilities and place different loads on the underlying IP network. In addition, users place performance requirements (e.g., throughput and responsiveness) on these applications that challenge the queuing and routing techniques employed by IP networks to manage the flow of application traffic.
Current network management tools cannot provide effective techniques for the monitoring and analysis of application traffic across IP networks. Existing techniques focus on individual IP packets or IP flows. Both of these techniques are too low-level to provide network management staff with an effective understanding of how individual applications are operating on their IP networks, and how those applications and the IP networks need to be configured and optimized to achieve better application performance. This is because the traffic for a single application can contain numerous distinct IP flows and even larger numbers of IP packets.
What is needed is a technique for monitoring and analyzing packet traffic on IP networks to provide a better view into the performance of the network at an application level.